{"id":27,"date":"2011-06-01T15:14:57","date_gmt":"2011-06-01T15:14:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/community\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/?p=27"},"modified":"2015-03-13T15:05:05","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T21:05:05","slug":"marian-devotion-for-uptight-anglos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/diaryofawimpycatholic\/2011\/06\/marian-devotion-for-uptight-anglos\/","title":{"rendered":"Marian Devotion for Uptight Anglos"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A friend of mine, a woman from the deep South who belongs to something called a \u201cBible Church,\u201d once said she wouldn\u2019t dream of asking the intercession of the Blessed Mother. \u201cYou never know what a woman\u2019s going to say about you behind your back,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

In Confessions of A Failed Southern Lady,<\/i> Florence King<\/strong><\/a> quotes Henry Adams<\/strong><\/a> to the effect that America\u2019s Puritan heritage has cheated American women out of two compelling role models \u2014 one being the pagan Venus, the other the Catholic Virgin. King adds that, for much of Christian Europe\u2019s history, the Virgin was a fearsome, goddess-like figure, far from the \u201clong-suffering Irish mother\u201d she\u2019s become since the counter-Reformation.<\/p>\n

Well, having known a long-suffering Irish mother or two, I have to concede my friend the point. Unless you want all of Ballywhatzis knowing your business, it\u2019s smart to play it close to the vest. Nevertheless, for many Catholic women, the Virgin remains a compelling role model, and presumably a discreet intercessor. My Patheos colleagues Pat Gohn and Julie Davis say so in this podcast.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I have to wonder, though, whether Mary\u2019s old-school image \u2014 the one that makes Protestants cry \u201cPagan hangover!\u201d<\/strong><\/a> \u2014 has been effaced quite so thoroughly as Florence King supposes. My first exposure to Marian devotion came in December of 1996, and it would have done any medieval hamlet proud. I was visiting the Tampa Bay branch of my mother\u2019s family. It so happened that something resembling the Virgin had appeared, several stories high, on the Seminole Finance building<\/strong><\/a> in the form of grease streaks. The inexplicable event had made nationwide news.<\/p>\n

My uncle and I drove down to see for ourselves, expecting to find the whole thing a hoot; we didn\u2019t. Though the image itself was ambiguous \u2014 it was just possible to make out an inclined head covered by a mantle \u2014 the behavior of the devotees was too serious to write off as mass hysteria. No one was prophesying about the end of the world; anyone who wept into her mustache did it quietly. The whole business had such a dignified air that my uncle and I could only mutter \u201cHow interesting\u201d before slinking off to Denny\u2019s.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why Florence King and Henry Adams missed all this. Adams was writing in the 1890s; King, was writing about the 1950s. Neither could have foreseen the transformative effect of Latino culture. If America has a goddess-rejecting Puritan heritage, it would probably come as a great surprise to most of the people covered by the Monroe Doctrine. Indeed, floating in the sea of poinsettas placed before the Seminole Finance building, I counted dozens of Cuban flags, along with notes that probably read: \u201cSEND CASTRO TO THE PAREDON!\u201d or \u201cBLESS THE SCHOOL OF THE AMERICAS!\u201d How long can Anglo America hope to resist?<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t speak for the women, but I have to admit, even since entering the Church, I\u2019ve been unable to help finding Marian devotion a little, well, girly. Now, this is a very unusual distinction for me to make. Judging by my work ethic, I seem to have shed my Puritan heritage quite nicely. Certainly I\u2019m far more androgynous, psychologically speaking, than a lot of guys I\u2019ve met named \u201cGuadalupe,\u201d \u201cRefugio,\u201d and \u201cPilar,\u201d most of whom looked ready to gut a man like a trout for snatching the last can of Tecate out of the Circle K cooler. Not long ago, I ran across some old APA-approved profile purporting to define the Guy Who Is A Swish Everywhere But in the Loins. I passed with flying pastel colors on every point save one. I don\u2019t idealize women. In fact, the very notion seems loopy to me.<\/p>\n

I suspect this is because, thanks either to training or inclination, I\u2019ve seen myself less a protector of women than a confidant. \u201cWalker\u201d was once the term for guys who squired women with busy or unsociable husbands. Most walkers were, or are, gay; but I suspect a few guys like me \u2014 straight guys with bendable ears \u2014 have managed to slip from time to time onto the union rosters. If no man is a hero to his valet, no woman can possibly be an angel to her walker. Indeed, walking for an angel would be a nonstop misery. Angels tend to have no idea who in the department or at the office is screwing whom, in any sense of the word, and obtaining that intel is one of the chief perks of walkerdom.<\/p>\n

To illustrate the kind of un-Marian behavior I find most endearing, I\u2019ll cite an episode involving my own mother, which took place at a wedding feast.<\/p>\n

It was the kind of affair that could only have taken place on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A colleague of my mom\u2019s boyfriend, who came from Bengal, was marrying a woman from Germany. Presiding jointly over the ceremony were a Lutheran pastor and a pair of Brahmins. (If any Catholic priest had gone near that altar, his bishop would have had him strangled.) After the Protestant had done his thing, the Brahmins recited what sounded like the annotated Vedas, and then, very graciously, translated. One of the Sanskrit benedictions went: \u201cMay you have many offspring of good moral character, and many milk-bearing cows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well, that had everyone rolling, which was appropriate enough, because it was then that the ceremony ended and the bar opened. This time, the (Rhenish) wine did not run out. Several times over the next few hours, my mother swam through the crowd, seized my arm, and brayed, \u201cMax \u2014 my offspring of good moral character, my milk-bearing cow! Get mother a drink, won\u2019t you!\u201d Like all true Manhattanites, we were planning to walk home that evening, and in any case I\u2019d never seen her having such a good time, so I obeyed gladly.<\/p>\n

Now, what we know of the Cana business comes from John the Evangelist \u2014 the first walker in Christian history. It\u2019s actually very flattering to think that a member of my own cast got a literal shout-out from the Cross. I\u2019ll have to reflect on that; hopefully, it\u2019ll help me shed my inhibitions and join the Marian party.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine, a woman from the deep South who belongs to something called a \u201cBible Church,\u201d once said she wouldn\u2019t dream of asking the intercession of the Blessed Mother. \u201cYou never know what a woman\u2019s going to say about you behind your back,\u201d she explained. In Confessions of A Failed Southern Lady, Florence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":192,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,36,49,107,133,137,138,148,184,208],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-among-women","tag-blessed-mother","tag-catholicism","tag-gender","tag-julie-davis","tag-latin-america","tag-latino-culture","tag-marian-devotion","tag-pat-gohn","tag-saints"],"yoast_head":"\nMarian Devotion for Uptight Anglos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A friend of mine, a woman from the deep South who belongs to something called a "Bible Church," once said she wouldn't dream of asking the intercession of\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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